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Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

theregister.com

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Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#121

Post by epolanski »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #5
bityard wrote: post #3

This is pretty interesting, and I have conflicted feelings about the (seemingly obvious) outcome of this trial. I wonder, if MS and OpenAI win, does that mean it will be legal for anyone to take the leaked source code for a proprietary product, train an LLM on it, and then ask the LLM to emit a version of it that is different enough to avoid copyright infringement? That would be quite the double-edged sword for propr…

I suspect that this is exactly what will happen; not just with code, but also prose and artwork. Someone is likely to design an LLM that is specifically trained to do exactly that. Lots of money to be made...

I feel like what really matters is who has more money to throw in tribunals.

Somehow I feel if it was "Adobe vs dev that claims his code was spit by copilot" it would not end the same.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#123

Post by deciplex »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #109

A slight aside, but this is the subtitle: > A few devs versus the powerful forces of Redmond – who did you think was going to win? I hate that kind of obnoxious "journalism". Sometimes the little guy is actually wrong. To clarify, I'm not commenting on the specifics of this case, I just hate how fake our online discourse has been by appealing to "big guy evil" before even bringing up the specifics of the case.

> Sometimes the little guy is actually wrong.

He is, sometimes. Also sometimes, the moon passes exactly between the sun and Earth, a new star appears in the sky, the magnetic field of our planet reverses, a proton decays (jury is still out on that one, actually). Etc.

Tools like Copilot are plagiarism machines. We know the data they're being trained on, and a conclusion of "that's plagiarism" is not - or anyway should not be - controversial. I'm not terribly against the notion of a plagiarism machine but I am against the owners of such machines reaping profits from them to the exclusion of the people who provide the source material. This is theft.

More importantly, getting back to big guys and little guys: big guys gang up on little guys all the time. It's usually how they get to be big. They tend to be the ones who realize that working together against the rest of us is to their benefit. So, in the interest of pushing back on that a little, and recognizing that I am after all a fellow "little guy" (figuratively speaking anyway), I tend to support the "little guy" unless I have overwhelming evidence confirming that they are, in fact, both wrong and that supporting them anyway would be against my best interest. Neither is the case, here.

At any rate, the subtitle here references a pretty ubiquitous and, I'm happy to report, increasingly well-known and understood facet of our economic and social institutions, which is that they absolutely positively do not work for us or further our interests in any sense.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#124

Post by shkkmo »

olliej wrote: post #88
Analemma_ wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is it any different when a machine does the same thing? Because intent matters in the law. If you intended to reproduce copyrighted code verbatim but tried to hide your activity with a few tweaks, that's a very different thing from using a tool which occasionally reproduces copyrighted code by accident but clearly was not designed for that purpose, and much more often than not outputs transformative works.

Um, the entire intent of these "AI" systems is explicitly to reproduce copyrighted work with mechanical changes to make it not appear to be a verbatim copy. That is the whole purpose and mechanism by which they operate. Also the intent does not matter under law - not intending to break the law is not a defense if you break the law. Not intending to take someone's property doesn't mean it becomes your property. You mi…

> Also the intent does not matter under law - not intending to break the law is not a defense if you break the law

Intent frequently matters a great deal when applying laws.

In the specific area of copyright law, it doesn't itself make the use non infringing, but it can absolutely impact the damages or a fair use argument.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#125

Post by yellowapple »

bityard wrote: post #3

This is pretty interesting, and I have conflicted feelings about the (seemingly obvious) outcome of this trial. I wonder, if MS and OpenAI win, does that mean it will be legal for anyone to take the leaked source code for a proprietary product, train an LLM on it, and then ask the LLM to emit a version of it that is different enough to avoid copyright infringement? That would be quite the double-edged sword for propr…

That's exactly what I expect to happen with the source code to Microsoft's own software products, namely Windows.

Hilarity will ensue :)

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#126

Post by yellowapple »

Spivak wrote: post #79
bityard wrote: post #3

This is pretty interesting, and I have conflicted feelings about the (seemingly obvious) outcome of this trial. I wonder, if MS and OpenAI win, does that mean it will be legal for anyone to take the leaked source code for a proprietary product, train an LLM on it, and then ask the LLM to emit a version of it that is different enough to avoid copyright infringement? That would be quite the double-edged sword for propr…

No, because judges aren't robots applying the law like code. Intent matters. If you do this it will be painfully obvious that your intent is to duplicate a large body copywritten code.

It's painfully obvious that the intent of GitHub Copilot is to duplicate a large body of copyrighted code.

Re: Judge dismisses DMCA copyright claim in GitHub Copilot suit

#129

Post by [deleted] »

ADeerAppeared wrote: post #89
squarefoot wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Isn't that akin to destruction of evidence?

Legally? No. In spirit? ... Probably? Unlike most LLMs, Github copilot can trivially solve their copyright problem by just using only code they have the right to reproduce. They have a giant corpus of code tagged with license, SELECT BY license MIT/Equivalent and you're done, problem solved because those licenses explicitly grant permission for this kind of reuse. (It's still not very cash money to take open source w…

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